Changelog News

Developer news with a shiny new website

Hello again 👋

We put a fresh coat of paint on the ol’ Changelog News website! The goal was to feature our content more prominently and add some social proof to help nudge potential subscribers in the right direction. Thanks to everyone who lent us your kind words! How’d we do? Hit reply with your feedback & bug reports…

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Podcasts? We got podcasts

🎙️ Thomas Paul Mann on leading & building Raycast changelog.fm/587
💚 Changelog News extended: Rug pull, not cool! changelog.com/friends/40
🚀 Paul Frazee on Bluesky apps shipit.show/100
🪩 K.O.O makes the case for the boring JS stack jsparty.fm/319
🤖 Udio & the age of multi-modal AI practicalai.fm/265
⏰ Local cert management for mere mortals gotime.fm/312

⚠️ The threat to open source comes from within

Forrest Brazeal wrote this not-thought-leadership piece before OpenTofu published its response to Hashicorp’s lawyers, but the general sentiment still stands.

First, he lays out why he doesn’t believe external threats like the XZ backdoor are existential for the OSS community. Then, he turns inward with the horror movie classic twist: “The phone call is originating from inside the house!” 😱

External threats, as the XZ thing demonstrates, seem to have a galvanizing effect on the broader open-source community. OSS just gets stronger under stresses like that.
The thing I’m most worried about now is the opposite: a chilling effect. And it’s been creeping up on OSS like a glacier for over a decade.

After a quick history lesson (Current situation: “ Everyone is mad at everyone”) and Forrest’s viewpoint of the OpenTofu / Hashicorp legal drama, he concludes with this somber note:

Here is where, if I were a thought leader, I would make some grand-sounding call for companies to “do better”, or for OSS foundations to “revisit their governance structures”, or something. But this is an impasse that can’t be solved with platitudes. Cloud companies, fundamentally, see open-source as something to exploit; OSS software companies see it as incompatible with a sustainable business model. Contributors who don’t work for either side are getting trampled on. And eventually, as the ecosystem fractures, everybody loses. The whole situation is just sad.
In the end, the fragile balance of open source—that unlikely blend of personalities and incentives that has driven tech’s innovation engine throughout the 21st century—won’t be upset by the odd state actor, or by malicious spam, or whatever scary new thing The Register is up in arms about tomorrow. It can only be disrupted when the community comes to believe maintaining that balance is more trouble than it’s worth. That’s the threat we should all be concerned about.

🍴 Redis is forked

Vicki Boykis:

I, as a cynical Eastern European, hate almost everything in software. But I love Redis with a loyalty that I reserve for close friends and family and the first true day of spring, because Redis is software made for me, the developer.

That’s high praise, which makes what she says next land with even more gravitas than it would in isolation:

The old Redis was for developers. The new Redis is for enterprise sales, and for generative AI. It’s true that it’s not yet entirely clear what all of this means for the future of Redis the software. Some say the licensing changes won’t impact much if you’re not a large-scale Redis reseller. Because it’s true that the license changes were all legal and all parties acted in accordance with both what’s acceptable and what the market dictates to sustain the software. And yet at the same time, projects that depend on Redis are withholding updates or migrating.
But the problem is not only that the license changed suddenly, without warning, it’s the messaging behind the change, and the message is, even though there is extremely active community development, Redis is no longer in and of the community. We are no longer being consulted.

If you heard Adam and I on Changelog & Friends over the weekend, you already know how I feel about this. But if you didn’t: I’m with Vicky. Redis is no longer for us, and I’m no longer for Redis. May a thousand ideas/forks rise out of its ashes.

📞 Less stress from ring to retro

Thanks to Firehydrant for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

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👻 Ghost is federating over ActivityPub

John O’Nolan and the Ghost team:

In 2024, Ghost is adopting ActivityPub and connecting with other federated platforms across the web.
This means that, soon, Ghost publishers will be able to follow, like and interact with one another in the same way that you would normally do on a social network — but on your own website.
The difference, of course, is that you’ll also be able to follow, like, and interact with users on Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Buttondown, WriteFreely, Tumblr, WordPress, PeerTube, Pixelfed… or any other platform that has adopted ActivityPub, too. You don’t need to limit yourself to following people who happen to use the same platform as you.

Instead of building this all behind closed doors, the Ghost team is inviting everyone to be part of their process. With each publishing platform that rolls out ActivityPub support, the promise of the Fediverse becomes less of an idea and more of a reality. Who’s next?

🦙 Llama 3 now available for “businesses of all sizes”

On April 18th, Meta released the latest version of their open(ish) LLM with “state-of-the-art performance.” The Verge rounds it up like this:

Meta claims both sizes of Llama 3 beat similarly sized models like Google’s Gemma and Gemini, Mistral 7B, and Anthropic’s Claude 3 in certain benchmarking tests. In the MMLU benchmark, which typically measures general knowledge, Llama 3 8B performed significantly better than both Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B, while Llama 3 70B slightly edged Gemini Pro 1.5.

What followed was your typical X Bros posting “N mind blowing demos” of what Llama 3 can accomplish (where N = the number a rival X Bro just posted + 1). Not interesting… But two things did stand out as interesting about this announcement:

They didn’t compare Llama 3 to GPT-4 at all, so we can only assume it still comes up short
They continue to call Llama “open source” even though the license retains the commercial requirement of your business not being too big (700 million MAU)

So I guess Llama 3 is open for businesses of all sizes, depending on how you define “all” and “sizes”…

❓ Questions to ask when I don’t want to work

Sometimes it’s easy, but other times (especially if you work for yourself) it’s necessary to put yourself to work. This post by nolen might help you get that done on days when you’d otherwise struggle. Here’s some bullet points to start from, but the details matter too.

To summarize, when I don’t want to work…
I don’t call myself lazy. I trust that I haven’t changed and look for what needs to.
I get excited about the end result and share what I’m doing with others.
I consider whether my tools are getting in my way
I give myself the same grace I’d give someone else, and consider taking a proper break
Last week I was struggling to work. I wasn’t excited about my current project. I took two days off and played a bunch of games and piano. I realized that I was excited to write this essay. And so I sat in a chair (not on the couch!) and wrote it.

🎉 Zero downtime Rails upgrades are within reach

Thanks to Test Double for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Putting off key Rails version updates is a recipe for disaster, because later usually means never.

Our friends at Test Double (you may recall from episodes featuring co-founder, Justin Searls) share a body of knowledge they’ve built up with over a decade of Rails upgrades in codebases like Gusto, GitHub, Zendesk & more.

Plus, their blog is chock-full of helpful tips, practical posts & a RailsConf talk that lays out a framework for an incremental approach to zero downtime Rails upgrades. Check it out!

🗯️ Quote of the week

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take that thought and apply it to software. Or just leave it alone and enjoy it for exactly what it is. (via Jim dash Nielsen)

👓 Introducing Meta Horizon OS

Meta is “opening up” the operating system that powers their Meta Quest devices so third-party hardware makers can build their own mixed reality devices on top. ASUS, Lenovo & the XBox team are already putting this tech to use, according to the announcement post.

Is this a move by Meta trying to make Horizon OS the Android to Apple’s visionOS? Hard to say this early in the game, but they’ve sunk a LOT of money into this effort….

📈 Measuring personal growth

Chip Huyen writes yet another excellent thing:

My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users.
This made me wonder if/how people are measuring personal growth. I don’t want to use metrics like net worth or the number of followers, because that’s not what I live for. After talking with a lot of friends, I found three interesting metrics: rate of change, time to solve problems, and number of future options.

👎 I love programming but I hate the programming industry

Have you ever felt like a faulty cog in a machine when the machine itself is faulty? That’s what this #somber post is all about, in light of a career in the tech industry:

Essentially, the concept of critical thinking has been made anathema to engineering: as a programmer you are to focus solely on the how, rarely on the what, and certainly never on the why. For the rare code monkey that finds themselves able and willing to critique the system they’re producing for the message is clear: leave that shit at the door. A code monkey is prohibited from even identifying the lack of autonomy and creativity inherent to the position - they can only strive to build more, never to build differently, or build different and better things.

🔗 More links for your clicking pleasure

Blocky is a fast / lightweight DNS proxy as ad-blocker for your LAN
MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world map renderer for your console
The Val Town team have learned that code search is hard
Hillel Wayne asks, If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
Supabase advises you try their PostgreSQL Index Advisor
Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon believe we need to rewild the Internet
James Smith built the world’s smallest Nintendo Wii
Tonsky says the hardest problem in CS is centering things
Somebody decited to put DOOM inside htop
Here’s a tiny world map for offline-first and low-bandwidth web apps

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week: Louis Pilfold, the creator of the Gleam, on Wednesday & Adam Jacob, from System Initiative, on Friday!

Have a great week, send our shiny new website to a friend who might dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod